Forbidden Fruit

Performa performance art festival

The three-week citywide performance-art festival Performa begins next week, opening not with a dinner but with a “food event”: “a series of food installations and happenings,” according to the invitation, “that will lead guests”—Cindy Sherman, Mario Batali—“on an interactive food journey.” The event, which will take place at an art space called X Initiative, on West Twenty-second Street, was created by Jennifer Rubell, a member of the art-collecting, hotel-owning clan. Rubell, a former food columnist, has done food installations before. For “Breakfast” (2007), at her family’s museum in Miami, she presented guests with a pile of two thousand hard-boiled eggs, two thousand strips of bacon, and surgical gloves.

The Performa event will be called “Creation,” a theme, Rubell explained the other day, that is both a play on the book of Genesis and “a light stand-in for the act of creation in general.” Rubell, who is thirty-nine, was in her car, driving to the North Fork of Long Island to pick out a critical part of the dessert course: three large apple trees, which will be chopped down, brought to the gallery, and laid out on the floor, so that guests can eat fruit from the branches. Rubell acknowledged that some people might find it disturbing to eat fruit from a chopped-down apple tree. “It feels like there’s a PETA problem with what I’m doing,” she said. “Even the guy at the tree-moving service said, ‘Let me get this straight: you’re killing the tree?’ There’s definitely an anthropomorphic quality to the whole project.”

But this was the point—“I wanted people to be forced to examine why they’re so concerned about killing an apple tree,” Rubell said. To heighten the effect, she’d looked for the most Biblical trees possible. “I wanted them to be really old trees—a hundred years old,” she said. “I wanted the intensity of the age to be explicit.” Calling around to apple farmers upstate, she encountered a problem: farmers tend to grow young trees, which are better for harvesting. The most Edenic apple-growing conditions that Rubell found were on Long Island. A little after four, she pulled up in front of an establishment called Wickham’s Fruit Farm, which has belonged to the family of its owner, Tom Wickham, for thirteen generations. Wickham was out front, wearing glasses and a dust-covered blue sweatshirt. He greeted Rubell, who has long black hair, and wore a black sweater and knee-high copper-colored boots, and they got in his truck and went out to the orchard.

It was a misty afternoon. Half-eaten apples lay on the ground, left by the Columbus Day pick-your-own crowds. Wickham pointed out new apple varieties—Empire, Razor, Jonagold. “I think the trees where it’s most likely you’ll still have apples two weeks from now are Braeburn,” he said. “It’s very light but will still be nice, the fruit not overripe.” But Rubell zeroed in on a row of Red Delicious. The trees were twenty-one years old, and about fifteen feet tall, and the fruit was very dark.

“I have to say, looking at it, even though it’s not the apple I prefer, it’s the more iconic apple,” Rubell said.

Wickham cringed. “It’s the worst apple on our farm,” he said. “If the customers didn’t keep asking for them, I wouldn’t grow them. I’m not proud of our Red Delicious.” Still, he helped pick out some tall trees, including a curved tree at the end of a row, and a tree with big clusters of fruit on its branches. “We occasionally do this—transplant trees—for clients in Greenwich who want an instant orchard,” he said. “We did it for Mel Gibson.

“In the old days, trees were huge,” Wickham explained. “Ninety-nine per cent of the fruit was high up in the top branches. Then scientists found dwarf trees in Europe. They grafted the rootstock of our trees onto the rootstock of those trees.” He pointed to some shrimpy young apple trees, easy for pickers. “Now they’re like grapevines.”

The chopping will happen like this: the day before the Performa event, Wickham will make an incision in the trunks with a chain saw and, with two farmworkers, will pull them down gently, using a rope, load them onto X-shaped “boat cradles” on a trailer, and drive them into the city. He will charge five hundred dollars per tree, plus shipping, and he’ll attend Rubell’s event the next night. Wickham said that he was fine with being both the grower and the executioner. “A grower has to be brutal and clear about removing old trees,” he said. “There’s a cycle.” He was asked if he ever experienced emotion while cutting down trees, and he pointed to some that he’d planted back in the eighties, when he and his wife had just returned from a stint in Sri Lanka. “We have two or three rows over there of Mutsu, a green apple that has been our livelihood, providing us with apples for the last twenty years,” he said. “They have been wonderful apples, and I have depended on them. It’s not like putting a dog to sleep, but I know what these apple trees have done for me.” ♦